Chapter Text
It came out of nowhere. Hatefully red in color, and wearing the smiling face of a devil, an enormous missile pelted across the skies of Piltover. It penetrated the council, unleashing a wave of fire and thunder so bright, so voracious and unslakable, that its like had never been seen before in a place so high.
The death and devastation were immediate. Each of the chamber’s unsuspecting inhabitants were subsumed with an absolute fire. Every iota of available atmosphere was swallowed up by the raging inferno, and the very bones of the council’s tower trembled with fear.
And so did Mel. In every direction, all around her, all at once, the entire world changed, rattling everything she had ever known or believed.
And yet, despite the fire, despite the obliteration of everything there was, the flame had not consumed her.
Mel’s hands tickled, tingling with a magical, electric energy that had never belonged to her before. It was something new, but not something borrowed, and that conundrum perplexed her. She’d never had a personal connection to the arcane before. So why now? And how exactly had she summoned it at the very moment it would spare her life?
For a long, morose moment, she hardly noticed the smoke and the screaming and the death lying there in the room with her. The only two thoughts racing across the wrinkles of her mind were the fact that she was alive, and the seeming certainty that she shouldn’t be. So she repeated the moment of impact again and again in her mind: The devil-faced missile hurtling through the south-facing window from some unknown trajectory. It had arrived so suddenly, so inexplicably, giving no one any time to react. And all Mel had managed to do was stand there gasping in awe, throwing her hands up in surrender to the absurdity of her final moment.
And yet finality had not come for her.
It should have been harrowing to witness it, a pants-soiling climax giving Mel one last sobering hurrah before the end, but instead it left her confused. The missile was not merely unexpected, but entirely unprecedented !
Then it crashed through the window, and the missile’s splash of hellfire cleansed the chamber with a purifying vengeance, purging the corrupt council of its dozen blind eyes. All their dreams and schemes and hopes and fears were blinkered out in a single moment. But that hadn’t fully sunken in yet for Mel. Not really. Not when her arms still tickled with the afterglow of a golden eclipse.
Her ears rang from the blast, and her eyes stung from the clouds of soot in the air as she gazed across the chamber, finally checking her surroundings.
A thousand cracks and splinters pockmarked the room, shattering the once-bold political arena into a brittle and crumbling ruin. The table was fractured, the chairs demolished, and the chair-holders lay scattered and scalded on the floor, their bodies broken well beyond repair. Bolbok had been bent into nothing more than scrap metal. Kiramman, Hoskel and Salo had been pulverized in their buttoned-up suits, squished and burst like sausages in a delinquent child’s fingers.
But Shoola, Jayce — the two to either of Mel’s sides — were only half-dead. Half alive.
Her peer and paramour gaped unflinchingly at the gore before them. If Jayce was aware that his left arm had been burned to a crisp, or if Shoola had realized that her entire right side resembled a charcoal pit, the two of them weren’t exactly showing it. And why would they? They were in shock, altogether struggling to understand how the untouchable council of Piltover had been so thoroughly touched.
Only Mel remained wholly unscathed, and only through the grace of an unexpected bounty of the arcane.
She turned her head to Jayce once more and saw a crispy corpse at his side. Viktor, their secondary scientist, was dead. Mel winced, grimacing at the severity of the damage. The lanky academic’s clothes had burned away, revealing an eerily purple pathogen clinging to his crippled leg. But Mel didn’t have time to second-guess the pallor of Jayce’s partner. Jayce himself was still alive, in part at least, and that was worth preserving.
“Jayce,” Mel whispered, her voice thin and croaking through the smoke.
The half-alive hammersmith replied weakly. He knelt down next to his dead friend’s body and nudged it in earnest, trying in vain to get a happier result. “Viktor?” Jayce cried. “No! Not like this. I… I can’t.”
Still shell-shocked, still searching for the “how” and the “why”, Mel watched as Jayce attempted to pry his partner off of the crumbling ruins of the council floor. It didn’t work. It couldn’t work. With only one working arm, there was nothing Jayce could do on his own to move the body.
And so, shaking with a timid tremolo, he declared his plan. “Mel!? The lab!”
Not another word was needed. She understood him immediately, automatically, and was in no position to argue. It seemed right , somehow. They needed to take Viktor’s body to the science center and… well… after that, she couldn’t even begin to guess what came next.
Mel flipped around, glancing quickly behind herself at the half-torched Shoola, somehow almost an exact mirror of Jayce’s damage. But Shoola was scuffling her feet, dragging her damaged heels to the elevator cabin at the far reach of the council chamber. So Mel returned to Viktor’s body, hunching down next to one of the shoulders and picking it up so she and Jayce could drag it away from ground zero. A pointless endeavor, probably, but Mel proceeded without protestation. She heaved ho and bore the body’s burden through the still-burning rubble. Past Cassandra. Past Irius. Past Torman. Past Salo. And past any chance of peace ever being brought to the table again.
As the weight of the dead grew heavier and heavier in her hands, it began to sink in for Mel just what exactly had happened: Whoever did this, whatever state or house had forged such an extraordinary feat of warcraft, they weren’t going to settle for taking down half of the council. No, with a malice like that, there was every chance that this attack was just the beginning of the madness to come.
The bleary haze of it all washed over Mel as she slumped against the side of the elevator cabin, dropping Viktor to the floor. Jayce buried his face in each of his hands, both the charred and the clean one. He sobbed uncontrollably over the body of his brethren. Sentimental as always, Talis’ greatest strength and weakness in one. But Mel knew that the moment called for a doer, not a despondent. So, as soon as Shoola had finished shuffling into the carriage, she punched the descender and prayed that the lift had not been seriously damaged.
It felt like freefall. With her sense of balance and location perturbed by the ringing in her ears, the long slide down to the ground may very well have been a plummet to her death and Mel wouldn’t have noticed the difference. She floated there in that liminal space, graciously accepting her inbound collision — a fitting coup de grâce for the humiliation her council had already endured.
And yet, somehow, splattering at the bottom of an elevator shaft was not the endgame that Fate had in store for the half-alive humans. The mechanical carriage came to a slow, steady stop, and its doors opened up to reveal an army of enforcers waiting to take the councilors into their arms.
“Miss Medarda! Talis!?” the officers cried.
Mel’s dizzying haze continued. Lightheaded, heavy-hearted, she stumbled into the foyer and almost shed a tear as the truth began to concretize in her mind. Everything seemed so surreal, a nightmare of such bizarre and evil design, but here there stood a score of blue-bedecked enforcers shouting her name, lending their hands, hoping to help however they could in ensuring the security of the surviving senators. This was not a dream. This was real. This was really happening. The death, the destruction, the attempted destabilization of Piltover.
It wouldn’t be long before the common folk would want an answer, and Mel had nothing to give them.
Had it been Silco? The attack? Surely not. Not if he thought peace was on the table. But then, who else? A rival? A rogue? An aspiring opportunist? Mel had no way to even know whether the perpetrators of the crime would own up to their deeds, or withdraw and hide in the shadows of obscurity. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the devil face on the front of the missile: red-hued with eyes of malice, and teeth that grinned from eating shit. Deep, giddy hatred, a playfully cruel harbinger of desolation.
As the enforcers dragged Mel out of the building, into the plaza beyond, she was struck by the sudden chill of the night air gracing her skin. Cold, open, vulnerable, this plaza was no restitution, and even further from a sanctuary. Mel’s skin quivered and sprung a field of goose-pimples, besot with an uncanny dread that loomed in the dark.
To her side stood Jayce, hunched over and haggard, carrying Viktor once more with the help of an enforcer, taking a small moment to breathe before continuing on to the lab. That was their destination, right? The science center? It still felt reasonable enough, despite everything, and Mel had already agreed to it. Hadn’t she?
But Fate had a different idea in store.
As Mel looked out into the plaza, staring with dead eyes past the chunks of stone and brick that had fallen from a hundred storeys above, she watched a wary audience of scared civilians circling around. Against their better judgment, most of them were choosing not to hide, not to run away and protect themselves. They wanted to see what had happened, and who, if anyone, would emerge from the ruin. So they gawked at Mel, Jayce and Shoola, all pointing and gasping and jeering with simmering mania. Not yet a boiling mob, but certainly moments away.
She needed to say something, to give them an address, to assuage their vexations in a way that only a Medarda could. Right…? It certainly seemed like it. After all, any other time that Mel had had this many men and women watching her every move, it’d been in the middle of a formal address. So the instinct ate at Mel. Tell them something! Give them an explanation…
But what? What could Mel possibly say that would make sense of any of this?
Nothing.
In the end, it mattered not. The answer to “who” and “how” came waltzing up into the plaza without any further warning or fanfare.
Wearing a hood that didn’t do much to hide her shimmer-pink eyes, and sporting a pink, cylindrical machine strapped over her shoulder, it was Jinx. It had to be. Smaller than Mel might have guessed, but height didn’t matter when you held the keys to death in your hands.
“No…”
“So, this is it, huh?” Jinx said, her scratchy, fried voice cutting clear across the plaza. “Looks like I missed a few of you.”
Her . It was her!? The woman who’s name had been on everyone’s lips, whose fingerprints had spent the past month smudging the City of Progress to pieces. Of course it was her! It had to be her…
“That’s okay,” Jinx continued. “I always finish what I start. Isn’t that right, Pow-Pow?”
“No, wait!”
The cry barely escaped Mel’s lips before it was drowned out by the rat-a-tat-tat of mechanical thunder. Bright orange peals of light burst from the end of Jinx’s cannon, and a hundred little bolts of superheated metal whizzed through the town square.
Mel flinched, squinting, throwing her arms up to block her face, as if somehow that would be enough to stop the bombardment of bullets cleaving their way through the crowd. Her skin tingled with electric fire, and her mind raged with the only question that remained: Why? What had Mel ever done to deserve such a grisly dismemberment? What poisoned womb had birthed such a miserable monster?
In between the clapping cacophony of gunfire, Mel could hear the screams of her audience shrieking with panic. She dared not open her eyes and see the mess for herself, unwilling to witness the scene in full color. It was bad enough that she could already smell the metallic tang of blood and gunpowder.
All of it burned a hole in her senses, eating away at her sanity. She gasped in short, staccato breaths, willing herself to wake up from the evilness of this dream. But it kept on going. The bullets bored their way through the bodies of every enforcer on Mel’s periphery, and plunked against the wall behind and the flagstones below whenever they went wide of the mark. Every blam and pop of the loose cannon had an echo that went squelch and splat, destroying and desecrating the edifice of progress.
Yet, for some reason, Mel was still alive.
As her skin continued to tingle with an electric hum, and the morbid curiosity burned within her, she finally opened her eyes to the massacre. A golden bubble surrounded Mel, sparkling like wine, encasing her as a temple of stained glass to call her very own.
It should have been a wondrous discovery, but Mel’s breathing hitched as she immediately came to terms with the limits of her power. The bubble, the arcane shell surrounding her, it didn’t extend very far, not spreading much more than her arms could reach. Not spreading to Jayce, not protecting him this second time.
The man of progress lay instead on the ground in a slowly expanding puddle of his own innards, their hot red juices filling the cracks in the flagstones and mixing with that of Viktor, Shoola, and every enforcer that had been brave enough to attempt a rescue.
Jayce, too, was dead.
Mel screamed. Crying out in anguish, she dropped to her knees beside the brutalized body of her paramour.
The golden bubble of arcane protection dissolved away, disappearing into the night, but Mel didn’t care. Nor did she much notice the blood staining and soaking into her dress. She hunched over, heaving, her whole body shaking, her eyes soaking wet with despair.
Jayce was gone. GONE. No more science, no more power coupling, no more warm nights in bed. Everything they had worked for, everything Mel had spent the past decade and a half creating for herself, all of it was being erased before her very eyes, and there was nothing she could do but watch. Helpless. Cursed to be in the audience of her own funeral.
After an eternity on the floor, she lifted herself up and glared at the monster that had made this happen: Jinx.
A pair of shimmer-pink eyes stared unblinkingly at Mel, challenging her, questioning the councilor’s inexplicable survival, and angered at the arcane defiance.
“Someone’s got a few tricks of her own…” the monster trilled.
“How could you?” Mel wanted to shout. The question burned on the tip of her tongue, but her throat was parched and swollen, and her mind had been rapidly numbing to the sheer volume of depravity around her.
Through it all, a surprising number of civilian onlookers had stayed to continue gawking at the carnage. They stood glued to the scene, not budging a speck, either too curious to leave, or too afraid that moving at all would draw the attention of the manic murderer.
But they were spared, for now, with the advent of another new arrival: It was Vi, and Caitlyn not far behind her, trudging up the street and making a beeline for the terrorist in the center of the plaza.
Mel blinked her eyes repeatedly, clearing the smoke and tears to try and better understand what was going on. Caitlyn looked injured, and Vi was sporting one of Jayce’s atlas gauntlets, but only the one on its own. Where its partner had ended up, or how long Vi and Cait had been tracking Jinx, Mel could barely begin to speculate.
Still confused, still despondent, Mel watched as Vi charged down on Jinx with the one gauntlet raised high and ready to pummel her.
“Jinx!” Vi screeched. “JINX!”
Hearing her own name, the loose cannon paused her plans of unleashing another torrent of molten lead in Mel’s direction. She turned her shimmer-pink eyes on Vi, locking in and aiming her weapon at the inbound fisticuff. Then she engaged the firing mechanism and ripped a stream of bullets at her attacker. Pow! Pow, the pellets popped from her murder machine, peppering Vi with a parade of death.
But Vi had dropped her arm just in time, summoning a crystalline shell of Hextech-blue that bubbled around her. Not too dissimilar from the golden bubble that Mel had summoned…
The barrier bounced the bullets away, ricocheting them to either side of Vi, spilling their lethal barrage into the crowd instead.
Screaming began anew, and a fresh wave of panic took to the streets as another bundle of bodies fell.
“Oh, good going, Sis!” the loose cannon shouted. She lowered her weapon temporarily to observe and scoff at her challenger. “Ya really couldn’t learn to leave well enough alone, couldja?”
Sisters?
Vi raised her gauntlet again, charging at Jinx and ignoring the provocation. She bore down on the loose cannon without further hesitation, without engaging the Hextech-shield again, and without any further risk of casualties from its reckless deflection. Then she leapt up into the air and flew fist-forward at her foe.
A rumbling of revenge erupted from Jinx’s side, ripping through the screams in the night air with its firework frenzy, but none of it was stopping Vi’s approach. So Jinx ducked down and lifted her murder machine up high, using it instead as a shield to block the incoming fist.
They collided with a crash, a colossal burst of chaos. The murder machine was broken, torn asunder and throwing a fit as it did so, but the gauntlet on Vi’s arm was just as worse for wear. Unpowered, unable to support its own weight, the mechanical glove dragged Vi down and brought her to the flagstones. She flopped there, flouncing, whimpering and waiting for Jinx to end it, but the ending never came. The loose cannon stood instead over top of her challenger and stared with deep-seated menace.
“Why are you defending them!?” she shrieked at Vi. “You’re nothing but the dirt under their nails!”
Vi heaved with ragged breaths, staring murderously at her sister. “Because,” she gasped, “I can’t let you hurt anyone else!”
Jinx roared in anger. She unstrapped a hand-cannon from her belt and pointed it at Mel.
Bang! The white hot metal raced past Mel’s cheek, nipping her skin ever so slightly. She flinched, trying to summon a shield for a third time, but nothing came. Whatever arcane coincidence had protected her before, it wasn’t there anymore. So Mel stood shaking helplessly as she stared down the barrel of death from a stone’s toss away. Not for the first time that night, she thought she was going to die, but that was not in the cards.
Off in the near distance, grabbing everyone’s attention, the sounding of a war horn announced the arrival of the cavalry. The ringing tone bounced resolutely off the white walls of Piltover, where it reverberated through Mel’s Medardan bones. She’d only ever heard it before when her mother marched to battle. But now, unlike then, Ambessa’s stampede was a welcome one.
Jinx dashed away from Vi, trailing with streaks of shimmer-pink through the air, and aimed her pistol at the oncoming Noxians. But Jinx’s little hand cannon was not the same impressive death-dealer her murder machine had been, and the breadth of the Medardan retinue carved an imposing silhouette in the night.
At their front, at Ambessa’s side, her bodyguard burst forth and lanced a spear in Jinx’s direction.
Its heft whizzed past the loose cannon as she shimmer-dodged to the side, then embedded in the pavement with a resounding thunk!
Vi, not wanting to miss the moment, released herself from the gauntlet’s burden, and leapt at Jinx to tackle her.
Another sidestep, another dodge. Whatever cursed concoction ran through the monster’s blood, it was giving her powers to do the improbable. She whipped around like a phantom, her long blue braids taunting any who dared approach her with a very grabbable-looking trail. But Vi was too slow, and nothing she tried was anywhere close to getting a grip on the loose cannon.
Caitlyn backed away, receding into the distance as Ambessa’s entourage pushed into the plaza. And the Noxians didn’t wait for Vi to similarly clear the area. They readied more spears and crossbows, and locked onto Jinx as best as they could.
The monster howled at being so thwarted, grumbling with vitriolic disappointment as the Medardan cortège began to surround her. Moving quickly, she stashed her weapon in her belt, then unclipped a string of canisters with ugly metal teeth welded onto them. Each of these, she lobbed at the Noxians, then prepared to dash away.
Mel realized too late what was happening: they were grenades! The explosives clamped down with their gnashing chomperings, latching solidly onto the Noxian shields, and ticked, ticked, ticked until the timer said to go boom!
Flashing lights, clouds of pink and orange, the chem-tech munitions mangled the Medardan retinue. And, adding insult to injury, when it had all concluded, Jinx was gone.
“That way!” someone shouted, as they waved in a particular direction, but no one else was inclined to follow. No one else was ready to let the loose cannon add their own body to the night’s grisly statistics.
Mel tried to count it up in her head. Six councilors, Viktor, over two dozen enforcers, several strays in the crowd, and a handful of Noxians… all from a single girl. Her lover, her empire, her people… Mel crumpled down to her knees again as she recognized the magnitude of the calamity.
Ambessa meanwhile rushed over to her daughter’s side and ordered her men to maintain a perimeter, but it hardly helped to make Mel feel any safer. Everything else was gone! Jayce, the council, the promise of peace, and the Hextech future they had been building together. Now what did she have? War? Fear? Was there anything more? Or had Jinx truly taken it all?
A boiling rage simmered in Mel’s blood. As she sobbed on the pavement, her throat filled with heart-burning vomit. She shivered once more, now shaking completely involuntarily, unable to stop herself from letting it all go.
Ambessa leaned down to try and rest a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, but Mel recoiled and summoned an arcane barrier between them. The golden energy blocked Ambessa’s hand, pushing her back and startling the warrior queen.
“Mel? Did you just…?”
She nodded, but didn’t address the arcane any further. They could broach that subject later. “We’re going to get her, Mother,” Mel said. “I swear to you, if it’s the last thing we do, we’re going to get that Jinx!”
The morning sun dripped tenderly through the remnants of the rafters in the old cannery. A decade ago, it had been the first place that Silco and the doctor developed shimmer together, dreaming of finally pushing the Topsiders out of their business, until a rambunctious kid strolled in and blew everything up.
And now, almost ten years later, that same girl had done it again.
Sevika stood in the midst of Jinx’s wreckage with her hand on hip, grimacing at the sight before her. It was impossible not to recognize the author of the mess, but that didn’t make it easier to discern why or what had actually happened.
Silco — dead — sat in a chair at the end of a lavishly decorated dinner table. There were half a dozen other assigned seats as well, but none of these were occupied by a corpse with a matching name, unless you counted the two creepy maquettes of Jinx’s brothers. The table itself was laden with what looked like half the contents of the girl’s hideout, all brought out in some ostentatious display, and Janna only knew when she would have had time to do so. Sevika hated to admit it, but Jinx could be frighteningly productive when she tried. But that didn’t even begin to explain the ‘why’ of it all. What had finally done it and sent Jinx over the edge with Silco?
“Grisly,” a soft, flirtatious voice commented. It was Margot, headmistress of the Vyx, who tilted her head coquettishly as she stared at the holes in Silco’s body. “A damn shame, too. But he can’t say we didn’t warn him.”
Smeech, the rat man who ran the Scraphackers, skittered into the seat assigned to Mylo, and knocked the maquette to the floor. “It’s what he deserved, you ask me. Can’t expect to keep your place as the Big Man in the Big Chair when you’ve got an anklebiter nipping at your heels. We’ve been saying it for years now: Jinx was his vulnerability.”
Chross, the stoic commander of the Hush Company, leaned in to get a better look at the deceased. “Hmm… Curious. Quite curious. Miss Sevika, if you please, a question?”
Sevika’s ears perked up, and she turned to the old man. “What?”
“The other night,” he said, “An envoy from the Topside council was observed by some of my scouts delivering a letter to Silco. I assume you are aware of this, and, given what previously happened to Renni’s factory, I further assume the two are related?”
Sevika shrugged. “What’re you getting at?”
“Do we know that this—” he pointed at the grotesque clown show around them, “—was definitely Jinx, and not someone else attempting to pin it on her? Someone like those infiltrators that razed the shimmer pit?”
“It was her,” Sevika said. “Trust me. After spending all these years wrestling with her bullshit every day, this poppycock here is as authentically Jinx as it gets.”
Margot chuckled lightly. “She does have a certain kitsch, doesn’t she?”
Smeech sat up straight and fidgeted with his cybernetic limbs. “You wanna know what I think happened? I’d put a hundred cogs on Baby Blue getting a back-alley dealio, a twofer from the old hag, Renni. Killed her kid, didn’t they? And Jinx loves blowing shit up. Match made in the halls of Janna herself! Prolly got the munitions from some prototype Sludge-tech Renni’s been holding out on us. But Silco? Heh. Bet he tried to stop her. Poor bastard.”
“A conspiracy?” Margot said. “Oh, this is getting juicy.”
Sevika frowned. “They offered him a deal. Topside. He didn’t get a chance to tell me what the terms were, but you can take your hundred cogs and bet they wanted Jinx’s head on a plate. As for Renni…”
Right on cue, Madame Sludgerunners herself arrived at the cannery with a suite of her chem-tank berserkers as protection. Their heavy-duty exoskeletons imposed an extra bulk of gravitas that the “old hag” alone could not command. Nevertheless, she stormed onto the scene and smirked at the gruesome layout of Jinx’s destruction.
“She’s done us a huge favor,” Renni crowed. “A service, even!”
Smeech grinned wide. Margot and Sevika each leered at the newcomer.
“Someone looks happy…”
The corners of Renni’s mouth filled out the smallest of smirks, and she quickly moved on to explaining herself. “The piece of shit who murdered my son is dead! Jayce Talis, man of progress, is now a thing of the past! And so are most of the other councilors, praise Jinx.”
“No shit?” Margot scoffed.
“The Noxian lives,” Renni said, “But that’s a trifle.”
“You’ve had confirmation?” Chross asked.
Sevika furrowed her brow. It was going to bug her if she didn’t ask. “Renni, were you involved in this ‘service’ Jinx rendered?”
“No!” the baroness replied, “But I could kiss her — that sweet, blue-haired freak. Why, in all of Silco’s tenure, we never got an opportunity to press our advantage like this .”
Chross cleared his throat before repeating himself. “Ahem — I take it you have confirmation that Councilor Medarda survived?”
Renni flipped around and sneered smugly at the old man. “Yes,” she said, “But worry not. A council of one is far easier to push around than the mighty seven. Ha! And yet, this iron won’t be hot for long. We must strike soon.”
“Ren, darling,” Margot said, “I’m amused as much as anyone else here by the ‘service’ Jinx has done for us, but this isn’t as much of a gift as you’re making it out to be. Our little scoundrel has just guaranteed that the only controlling voice remaining upstairs, Medarda, is the one with the backing of an entire army to retaliate with! You know they’re going to come knocking, right? Her family? And it'll make the past month of bad business look like childsplay.”
Chross nodded in agreement. “Madame Margot is correct. If we, the Chem-baron Conglomerate, are to avoid their ire, I dare say it behooves us to put forward a unified story.”
“Like what?” Smeech said.
“Simple,” Chross explained. “ ‘This attack was not ours; We are not Jinx; Silco is dead’. Those would be, on balance, the central points we must adhere to.”
Smeech rolled his eyes dramatically, then shifted around in Mylo’s chair. “You actually think Topside’ll care whodunnit? They’ll give us hell and back regardless, busting our chops ‘til they’ve got their pound of flesh. Same story as ever.”
“I’ll bite,” Renni said. “Let’s give them Jinx. What do I care? She’s already served her purpose.”
Sevika, meanwhile, found herself unexpectedly hesitant. Not that she hadn’t been trying to get rid of Jinx for years now, but the idea of making any conciliation to the Pilties was aggravating. Certainly Silco himself never would have gone for it, and turning Jinx in right off the bat was potentially getting rid of the barons’ only bargaining chip. Moreover, Sevika still had a hundred and one questions for the little rascal to answer.
“It’s too bad…” Margot sighed, scrunching up her face. “I mean, I don’t know… For as messy as she is, I’ve found myself oddly fond of Jinx at times, and I know a fair few of my love-makers are as well. Hell, if Jinx ever started her own gang… Shit, I’d lose half my top twenty.”
“Buncha kooky fuckers,” Smeech complained. Then he got up from Mylo’s chair, crawled his way over to Sevika, and patted her on the shoulder where her mechanical limb should’ve been. “I’ll tell ya what, you one-armed bandit. You help us track her down, put a nice little bow on her for Topside, and I’ll getcha fixed up with something good ‘n’ special. A real top-of-the-line gripper!”
Sevika recoiled from the rat-man’s touch, frowning feverishly at him.
“What?” he scoffed. “That ain’t a good enough offer to you, or are you suddenly going soft on Baby Blue like Margie here?”
“Fine,” Sevika huffed as noncommittally as she could muster. “I’ll look into Jinx’s usual places. At the very least, she’s due for some answers.”
“Answers? Ha!” Smeech cackled. “The only important question we’ve got here is ‘who’re we putting in the Big Chair’ tomorrow?”
“Don’t worry, Furball,” Margot said, “You’re much too small to qualify.”
Chross stepped forward, getting between Smeech and the others. “None of us deserve the ‘Big Chair’. It is my sincere opinion the Conglomerate will be better without one. Lest we run the risk of another ego at the top who can use his veto to protect himself from consequences, all of our voices must be equal.”
Sevika cast a glance at Silco’s corpse and sighed. She knew it was true. They all did.
“More to the point,” Chross continued, “Each of us have our parts to play. My network is currently ascertaining as much information as they can. All pertinent data will be shared with the group.”
“And I,” Renni added, “Am preparing my berserkers to defend the southside from any attempted retribution.” She turned to Margot. “Yes, Miss Vyxen , I had already considered this! And with Jayce dead, they’ll not have any more of their precious Hextech to overwhelm us.”
Margot sneered mockingly at the old hag. “Bully for you, Ren.”
“Are we in consensus?” Chross asked. “We must send a message to Piltover explaining the following: ‘All of this is on Jinx, and we, the Chem-baron Conglomerate, shall be handing her over, dead or alive, as soon as she can be located and detained. Until then, retaliation from northside into the south will be treated as a declaration of war.’ ”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Smeech agreed, “But who’s even left to take a message if all the council got blown to bits?”
“Everyone,” Sevika said. “Not just Mel — the other nobles as well. Any number of them will have already been waiting in the wings to fill the power vacuum Jinx created. Biding their time… calculating when and where to schmooze.”
“True,” Margot said.
Chross nodded along in solemn concession. “Some things are the same Topside and Bottom.”
“Why are you defending them? You’re nothing but the dirt under their nails!”
The words replayed themselves a hundred times in Vi’s memory as she worked her way through the bloodbath. Her sister’s words. Her sister’s kills. They weighed equally heavily on Vi as she pushed through the gore, moving all the corpses and rubble around as part of the recovery effort. She might not have had the fancy boxing gloves anymore, which certainly would have come in handy for such a task, but she still had all of her own home-grown muscles and tenacity. Like she learned in the Lanes, like Vander taught her. So she pushed ever on through the plaza under the council tower’s shadow, which offered only a faint reprieve from the hot midday sun.
They were almost done by now, but only because Vi and the others had worked tirelessly through the night to make sure Mainstreet wasn’t mired in massacre for a moment longer than it needed to be. Everything already reeked of spilled blood, but it would be significantly worse soon when the putrefaction set in. So every broken body on the boulevard needed to find its way to a new home, and preferably one where someone dear to them could recognize and reclaim it.
With so many of the enforcers dead, and still no one in the precinct having stepped up to replace Marcus, it came as little surprise to Vi when alternative enforcement was provided. Fancy ass private militaries, essentially. First, and most obviously, there were the dozens of Noxian soldiers in Ambessa’s company, who swooped in to take control of the situation as soon as Powder had slipped away. No! Not Powder — Jinx, the monster Vi had created, the reason all of this had happened…
“You’re nothing but the dirt under their nails!”
After the Noxians, next came the Ferros Clan, a bunch of hoity-toity old windbags who apparently held some sort of investment in both Hextech and the Medarda Clan. Or at least that’s what the head windbag Camille’s excuse had been when she came barging in and insisting she ought to be in control of things. She and her army installed an outpost with tents and equipment and other supplies to immediately assist with the recovery effort.
In truth, the Ferros aid had been a welcome addition, but it pissed Vi off to see how much actual power was available when someone from Topside was having an emergency. Whereas that same amount of effort would never be made for someone hurting in the trenches.
“Why are you defending them?”
Vi glanced out at the pavement where over two dozen enforcers had been felled by her sister’s weapons. Adding it all up, ever since Vi had been sprung from the big house, her sister had put at least forty of the blue-bellies down. And it almost felt right. It almost felt like they deserved it, the Enforcers. After killing Felicia and Connol, and everyone else on Vander’s bridge. After beating Vi senseless in Stillwater for so many years… she knew where her sister was coming from.
And it’s not that Powder was mistaken about how the undercity had been wronged, but this wasn’t the answer. It couldn’t be. Otherwise they were just as bad as the Topsiders, not caring who they hurt as long as they got their way.
Caitlyn was proof it didn’t need to be like that. The Topsiders could be talked to, they could be reasoned with and related to if only you gave them the space to do so. And this — the murdering, the explosions — that was never going to give anyone the space for peace! Hell, Vi wouldn’t have blamed Caitlyn if her spirit had been broken. It was miraculous enough that nobody here was sending Vi packing, kicking her back down to the fissures where she came from and belonged. So she continued lending her hands, dirty nails and all, to prove as much as possible that she wasn’t her sister.
Taking a beat to wipe the sweat from her brow, Vi glanced across the plaza at one of the several pop-up tents currently housing the dead. Inside of its cool shade, Vi could barely make out the shape of Tobias and Ximena at Caitlyn’s side, the other two survivors of Cassandra and Jayce respectively. They were adorned in black already. Though this was not yet the funeral, it may as well have been. It’s not every day you get to stand around in your loved one’s murder scene.
Vi wanted to go there, to the tent, to be with Caitlyn and hold her hand and give the world’s shittiest attempt at offering comfort, but it felt immensely inappropriate with Tobias and Ximena in the same room. So Vi remained out in the plaza and heaved another heap of rubble.
Sweaty, gross and unflattering though it may have been, that didn’t stop Vi from eventually being approached by Camille herself, the head windbag of the Ferros Clan.
“Violet,” the intelligencer began, “Your efforts here are commendable.”
Oh, here we go. She was angling for something.
Vi stopped in her tracks and chuckled awkwardly. “Buttering me up, huh? ‘Camille’, was it? Why? Whaddya want?”
The woman, a tallish hexagenarian with a coif of platinum white hair wrapped around her peaky head, stood with a perfectly balanced posture. Unnatural, much too stiff to be real. She smiled ever so slightly as she replied, “Observant, and prudent. Useful qualities. Yes, Miss Violet, I am in search of something, and require information from you.”
“What?” Vi scoffed. “Ya lose one of your bodies?”
“Exactly that ,” the intelligencer replied. “I must ask whether you are familiar with a gentleman by the name of Viktor.”
Vi shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
So Camille described him, “A thin man with hazel eyes and a short crop of brown hair. He would have been wearing the academy uniform.”
With that, Vi sarcastically raised a hand to her ear. “Nope! Still not ringing. Gonna hafta try elsewhere.”
“Unfortunate.”
“Wait, why?” Vi asked. “I thought it was just councilors and coppers that got dropped. Did somebody…”
She stopped herself, and a pang of guilt flooded her gut. The night before, when she’d first run into the plaza to try and prevent Powder from doing anything, she’d used the atlas gauntlet’s shield to protect herself, but some of the bullets bounced wide and likely hit the nearby onlookers. Was that why Camille was asking? Did they suspect something? Because Vi had accidentally ricocheted some lanky nerd from the academy?
“That, Miss Violet, is privileged information.”
“Oh…”
Vi chuckled again, trying to rid herself of the nervous energy.
“In any case,” Camille continued, “I have a secondary question for you.”
“Yeah, sure, shoot,” Vi said. She bit her tongue afterwards, immediately recognizing the inappropriateness of the slang. But the old windbag didn’t seem to care.
“I have been informed that you brought with you only one of the atlas gauntlets designed by the late Mr. Talis, yet you had previously absconded with a pair. Is that correct?”
So it was theft now? Vi swallowed the lump in her throat.
“Look, lady,” she said, “You want the other one? Go nuts. ‘Cuz unless someone moved it, it’s still in that fucking cannery where… where Jinx launched the rocket from.”
Camille brightened up slightly, her eyes widening just a hair. “Is that so? In that case, I will instruct my agents to search for it when they arrive for their investigation. We have already traced its trajectory, so there will be no need for further direction.”
“Damn, and here I was just about to offer. Might wanna hurry, though. Undercity’s gonna have that shit scrapped in a minute if you don’t hop to it.”
“You were there, correct?” Camille asked. “At the scene during the crime?”
“Yeah…”
“The technology used to launch the missile, it does not match any of the schematics that the Ferros Clan have absorbed from the late Mr. Talis. We are aware that several schematics were stolen, but have not yet verified which ones. Would you be able to identify whether the device used in the attack was one of Mr. Talis’ designs, or proprietary to this ‘Jinx’?”
“Heh, no. You’d have better luck asking my sister.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She was always more of the tinkerer. Even knew how to tell real Valdianis from fake ones.”
Camille cocked a brow curiously. “Are you attesting to a fifth participant in the event, Miss Violet?”
“Err… What?” Vi froze again. She’d said too much.
“Yourself, Miss Kiramman, Mr. Silco, the criminal known as Jinx, and also your sister? Are you attesting to this fifth participant?”
Vi bit her lip. “No… there was… no. Just the four. My sister’s gone.”
“Ah! My condolences, then,” Camille said, her tone flat and not remotely apologetic. “I appreciate your candor, Miss Violet. As you may have ascertained, my clan is in the important position of overtaking Hextech’s development from Mr. Talis, and it is paramount that we control the narrative — just as we plan on controlling the power of this unparalleled technology.”
They’re making more! More Hextech, more weapons, more war…
“Wait, hang on,” Vi said, “You’re not mothballing it? One blown-up council building wasn’t enough for you, now you’re gonna go proliferate this shit?”
“Miss Violet,” Camille huffed, “It is unfortunate that the undisciplined of our undercity have their hands on Mr. Talis’ technology, but a bell once rung cannot be unrung. Therefore, our only recourse is to ensure that we are sufficiently prepared to proactively defend ourselves in the coming times.”
Vi groaned bitterly. The more the old windbag talked with her twisted words, the less Vi liked her. “Don’t bullshit me, okay? ‘Proactive defense’ might poll well with your little industry buddies, but we both know you mean ‘offense’.”
The intelligencer smiled ever so slightly. “Once again, Miss Violet, your candor is to be commended. In due time, expect an invitation for yourself and Miss Kiramman to the Ferros research facility, and I will show you what plans we have for this city.”
“Yeah, can’t wait,” Vi scoffed.
“Then that will be all,” Camille concluded.
She turned around and stepped away with her annoyingly perfect stride. Every step measured down to the millimeter, every arc of her arms swung with immaculate metrics. It felt artificial, to the point where even the smoothest of Powder’s automatons may have been more lively than Camille. Vi frowned again, scrunching her face up in disgust, trying to imagine what kind of circumstances would breed such an inhuman person as Camille.
But that bitterness was an unhealthy place to stay in, so Vi returned to her work.
Digging. Lifting. Moving. Recovering.
All the while, Vi continued stealing glances across at the tent that Caitlyn was in. With every bit of rubble dragged across the pavers, Vi would steal another look, and then another and one more. It only took a hundred or so before she noticed Tobias and Ximena had finally departed. The coast was clear! Tempted, Vi temporarily abandoned her post, and made her way over to the pavilion.
Sneaking into the lavishly decorated pop-up, she sidled up next to Caitlyn and wrapped the grieving woman in a pair of sweaty arms. That was a mistake.
Caitlyn winced, stiffening her whole body until she felt every bit as rigid as the corpses Vi had been handling.
After a moment, when Caitlyn noticed it was Vi, she began to loosen up a little.
“Sorry,” Vi quickly apologized.
Caitlyn shook her head in tight little arcs. Her lip quivered for a minute as she struggled to get her words out. “I could have stopped her, Vi. I should have stopped her! Tackled her, or pulled the trigger, or… I should’ve done something the moment I saw that glint in her eyes, but I waited… I hoped…”
“I know, Cait, I—”
“It’s my unending trust!” Caitlyn continued. “I put my faith in people, wanting to believe from the core of my heart that there’s a drop of good in everyone, but lately it just seems to keep on kicking me in the teeth! First Huck, then Marcus, and Jinx…” She hesitated, her breathing dangerously ragged. “Vi, I don’t like who they’re turning me into. I’m not supposed to be this hateful person that I feel like right now. This… this animal!”
“You’re not an animal, Cait.”
“Then tell me, please, why does every smidgen of my body ache for her blood?”
Vi withdrew from the hug so she could try and look Caitlyn in the eyes, but the gesture was not returned. Caitlyn remained gazing headlong into the distance.
“Because you’re hurting,” Vi said. “Cait, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours, and it takes a hell of a lot longer than that to grieve. Trust me, I would know. It can take years, and… And hey, for what it’s worth, you’re not wrong to put your faith in people. That’s one of my favorite things about you! And I’ll be doing my damnedest to make sure I never break your trust.”
It didn’t matter. Caitlyn wasn’t hearing it. “ Wanting things isn’t enough to stop the opposite from happening.”
“I hear you, I do,” Vi insisted. “Just tell me how I can help you right now, in this moment, because all we have is the present.”
“You want to help?” Caitlyn asked.
“Of course!”
So Caitlyn leaned over slowly and gestured to the dead bodies of Jayce and Cassandra. Each was in a box of their own, a preliminary coffin, and laid out as straight and respectfully as could be managed by Vi and the others. But an undertaker Vi was not. She had no practiced skill for posing corpses.
“How did you do it?” Caitlyn asked. “When you lost your family, how did you make it through the day after that?”
Vi sucked in her teeth before answering, “Oof. Which time?”
Idiot. Stupid fucking thing to say. She winced and bit her lip as she cringed at her own inappropriate snark.
“I… either,” Caitlyn replied. “How do you keep going when you’ve lost so much?”
“Well,” Vi answered slowly, choosing her words more carefully this time, “If you’re lucky, then you find the people who are still with you, and you hold onto them even stronger. Or… or you end up finding a new family. Whether it’s in the arms of a man you barely know, or in the shadows of some skittish tweakers from the cells next to your concrete box, you have to find a place to belong. I mean, I know that’s not what you want to hear right now, but sometimes getting knocked down means starting over. And, well, you just hope you can build up to something good again.”
“That easy, huh?”
“It’s not easy, Cait. It’s hard, and it hurts, and it can take a long time to feel like you’re doing okay again. But you have to give yourself the space to change.”
“But that’s exactly what I’m afraid of!” Caitlyn said. “I don’t like what I can feel I’m turning into.”
“Then don’t,” Vi told her. “This is going to change you — it is, and we can’t escape it anymore — but it doesn’t have to change you into that .”
“I…”
Caitlyn hesitated, pausing so she could try and internalize the advice she was being given. Then she nodded slowly. She stepped away from the bodies and fell into Vi’s embrace.
“I’m sorry, Vi,” she said. “And I’m so, so grateful that you’re not in a concrete box anymore.”
“It’s alright,” Vi told her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good,” Caitlyn said, “Because I need you now more than ever.”